A spring-run Chinook salmon attempts to hide during this year’s survey of the Salmon River. Wednesday’s count found only 106 adult salmon, which is believed to be the second lowest count since the survey began in 1995.
Will Harling — contributed

“Devastating” was how Karuk Tribe Executive Director Josh Saxon described the news that only 106 adult spring-run Chinook salmon were found on the Salmon River this year — believed to be the second lowest count on record.

The results of the annual Salmon River fish count on Wednesday as well as poor river conditions on the Klamath River tributary has prompted concerns about the potential for a fish kill and the future viability of what some say is already an endangered species.

“I think it’s really important to emphasize that this is a really critical time for these imperiled fish that were once and for a very long time the most dominant run of salmon in the Klamath Basin,” said Salmon River Restoration Council restoration director Karuna Greenberg, whose group coordinates the yearly salmon count with aid of other groups and the U.S. Forest Service.

Last year only 110 adult spring-run Chinook salmon were counted, the second lowest at the time. This year’s preliminary count seems to have claimed that title, though count data from a nearby creek have yet to come through.

Teams of divers from various organizations, environmental groups, state and federal agencies and Klamath Basin tribes have surveyed the entire length of the nearly 80-mile river since 1995, with the lowest count occurring in 2005 at 90 fish — three years after the devastating fish kill on the Klamath River – and peaking at 1,600 fish in 2011.

Klamath Riverkeeper board member Nathaniel Pennington said that historically the spring-run salmon were found to have ranged into the upper Klamath Basin in southern Oregon — now blocked by hydroelectric dams — and once numbered in the thousands.

A 2017 report by UC Davis and California Trout found Klamath-Trinity River spring-run Chinook salmon were at critical risk of extinction within the next century if conditions continue.

Tribes and restoration groups now place their hopes in recent petitions to list the salmon run as an endangered species as well as in a pending project to remove four hydroelectric dams from the Klamath River that block access to historic territory.

The Karuk Tribe with the aid of the Salmon River Restoration Council submitted a petition to list the spring-run Chinook salmon as endangered under the federal Endangered Species Act in late 2017 and submitted a petition for state listing earlier this month. The National Marine Fisheries Services began a yearlong review of the petition in March — the first time the government has reviewed whether the spring-run salmon is actually its own species.

A 2011 petition to list the spring-run Klamath Chinook salmon was rejected because not enough evidence was presented showing that spring-run salmon are genetically distinct from their fall-run counterparts. The evidence would have to show that spring-run salmon would be “unlikely to re-evolve over ecological time-scales,” according to the National Marine Fisheries Service.

Advertisement

A study published in August 2017 by UC Davis Animal Science Professor Michael Miller and his team discovered evidence appears to have proven just that. The study found spring-run Chinook had a single gene that determines whether the salmon will migrate earlier or later in the year, with the gene having appeared and diverged the two species about 15 million years ago. These findings appear to uproot previous assumptions that early migration habits evolved multiple times.

“By supporting the last viable population of wild spring Chinook in the Klamath Basin, the Salmon River is a sanctuary for genetic variation that will be crucial for restoring spring Chinook in other areas of the Klamath, such as the upper basin after dam removal,” Miller wrote in a statement to the Times-Standard on Thursday.

Pennington said that a new study by Miller in which they examined salmon bones from hundreds of years ago, which after DNA extraction were found to be mostly spring-run salmon.

“Spring-run Chinook salmon are the best-suited salmon to re-inhabit the area above the Klamath dams,” Pennington said. “And so as we look toward dam removal in the next several years it becomes even more important that we do everything we can to try to keep spring Chinook viable; and amongst many reasons, that’s one of the big reasons we felt like petitioning the listing.”

A poor water year in the upper Klamath Basin and warm conditions have made for alarming conditions on the Salmon River. Warm water can act as a stressor to salmon immune systems and can be ideal temperature for parasites and infections that are believed to have significantly impaired recent salmon runs on the Klamath River.

In the 2014 and 2015 drought years, up to an estimated 90 percent of Chinook and Coho salmon juveniles were believed to have been infected by an intestinal parasite.

Greenberg said those widespread infections likely played a role in the low returning Salmon River runs in the past few years.